Amelie O. Rorty - March 28, 2011

Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Boston University and Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School

"The Use and Abuse of Morality"

(Henry Bugbee Annual Lecture in Philosophy)

8:00 PM Monday, March 28, 2011University Theatre

A long-time philosophy professor at Rutgers University before becoming affiliated with Harvard, Professor Rorty has an international reputation for her work on the great traditions of Western Philosophy. A lifetime of thinking, teaching, and writing about Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and other masters has prepared her to offer a powerful lecture on the use and abuse of morality, a theme with some claim on the attention of an age that is unlikely to go down in history for its moral attainments.

Please note: These lectures will not be posted online and a podcast will not be made available.

"On the Other Hand: The Ethics of Ambivalence"

3:10 PM Monday, March 28, 2011Gallagher Business Building 123

You are cordially invited to attend a seminar with Amelie Oksenberg Rorty. A Yale University Ph.D. graduate, she taught at Rutgers University from 1961 to 1988. Since leaving Rutgers, her professional itinerary has included teaching stints at Boston University, Mount Holyoke College, Brandeis University, Yale University, and now Harvard. She has been awarded research fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the National Humanities Center. Her major book, Mind in Action, appeared in 1988 (paperback edition 1991). She has edited or co edited fourteen books while contributing essays to them all, including Pragmatic Philosophy (1966), Explaining Emotions (1976), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (1980), Essays on Descartes’ Meditations (1986), Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics (1992), Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1996), Philosophers on Education: Historical Perspectives (1998), The Many Faces of Evil (2001), and Essays on Kant’s Idea for a Universal History (2009). She served as General Editor of Modern Studies in Philosophy, 38 volumes (Doubleday-Anchor) and of Major Thinkers, 33 volumes (University of California Press). She also was General Editor of the University of California Press Series on Major Traditions, with volumes on Skepticism, Stoicism, the Enlightenment, and many others. She has published 110 articles in scholarly journals and anthologies. She has given invited lectures all over the world. Two current projects under contract with Oxford University Press and scheduled for imminent publication are “From Passions to Emotions and Sentiments” and “On the Other Hand: The Ethics of Ambivalence.”